The Paradise nightclub in La Jonquera. Gianluca Battista
The entire police force tirelessly followed José Moreno's trail. The aim was to ban the businessman from the world of prostitution because he had sexually exploited women in brothels. But they never succeeded. The extensive police investigations ended without results or with punishments that had nothing to do with trafficking in women. Moreno ran through their hands like water. The agents pursued the money until the end and accused Moreno of tax fraud in a macro case overseen by the National Court. But Moreno will not be able to sit on the bench in his major trial, in which prosecutors are asking him to serve 10 years in prison and prosecutors are asking him to serve 52 years. The businessman died yesterday at the age of 72 as a result of an illness.
Moreno, originally from Granada, lived a life full of surprises. Before the prostitution investigation, he ran restaurants in Platja d'Aro, one of the mythical places on the crowded Costa Brava where tourists still come to party. He later opened a brothel in Mont-ras, Eclipse, and another in Pla de l'Estany, Eden, where police investigations linking him to trafficking in women had an immediate impact on him. But his final rise to fame came when he fought with the city council of La Jonquera, on the border with France, to convert a 2,700 square meter industrial warehouse into one of Europe's largest hostess clubs: the Paradise.
The route was not without danger. Moreno is one of the few people who, without being a target of terrorist gangs, saw a car loaded with TNT and several butane bottles parked at the door of his business building on a busy day in 2012. It didn't explode because it failed. The device. The Mossos launched an investigation named Rockefeller, in honor of the puppet of their namesake, ventriloquist and producer José Moreno. The investigation was never able to prove that these were attacks commissioned by competitors with the aim of ruining the business. Five years later, one of the alleged perpetrators, Xavi alias El Gordo, died from the sticky bomb planted in the chassis of his car in the parking lot of his house.
“You’re just talking badly about me,” Moreno, who never lost his southern accent despite spending most of his life in Catalonia, replied on the phone. Aware of the saying that the only thing worse than being talked down to is not being talked down to at all, he opened Paradise in style in 2010, opening the doors to the press, albeit with no women or customers in the room . inside. Journalist Esperança Padilla won an award for posing as a prostitute and managing to work in paradise using a false identity without too much difficulty.
During the pandemic, the already exhausted José Moreno was forced to close like all other brothels. Dozens of women remained on the streets overnight without protection. “There is no other option,” he assured this newspaper, confessing that he was tired of the difficulties that tormented his company every day, which had put the years of controversy behind it and was moving forward discreetly. At this point, he had already completed the Eclipse and Eden. The Paradise was happy with a predominantly weekend crowd and French people.
As Diari de Girona reported, José Moreno died yesterday in Malaga. More recently, he himself stated that he had spent a long time outside of Girona, where he built his life as a businessman in the world of prostitution. His death marks the end of criminal proceedings brought against him for allegedly defrauding the Ministry of Finance and failing to disclose the commissions it charged to customers who used the company's ATMs to withdraw cash. A major trial known as Operation Pompeii, in which numerous businessmen from the world of prostitution are investigated and in which his right-hand man is also accused.
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Paradise is still open, with his brother at the helm. “He prepared everything during his lifetime,” says one of his managers, regretting that no one tells us that Moreno “fed many families.” And he believes that if he had held his funeral in La Jonquera, “the highway would have had to be closed because of the many people who would have come.”
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